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This past Wednesday and Thursday I attended the online Handheld Librarian Conference, thanks to a generous offer of free registration for SJSU SLIS faculty, students, and alumni (SJSU SLIS was a sponsor). I had followed a previous Handheld Librarian through twitter and it sounded very interesting and useful, so I was excited to get the chance to attend this time. I got a lot of new information about mobile library services and tech trends at this conference, and it’s all still swimming around in my head. I hope to get a post or two up on my thoughts early next week.

I saw in passing on a knitting blog (unfortunately I can’t remember where) a feature called “WIP Wednesdays,” which I thought sounded like a good idea for a recurring feature. One, because I write about multiple topics on this blog and some people might not be interested in all topics, so having a regular schedule would be useful for them. And two, because I liked the alliteration. “WIP,” for the non-knitters, means “work in progress” and just means a project that we’re currently working on. However, I didn’t get a chance to write anything on Wednesday due to being at the Handheld Librarian Conference all day, and then on Thursday my WIP became a FO (Finished Object)! So here’s a FO that I am very excited to be done knitting:

This morning I attended a webinar on Tech Trends from ALA TechSource. The webinar featured three panelists who looked back at their experiences at this year’s ALA Annual Conference in Washington to see what stood out as trends in library technology. Since I did not get the chance to attend ALA this year, I was really interested in this topic, and I was disappointed when the original webinar was cancelled due to technical difficulties.

Lately, the library twittersphere has been all, um, a-twitter about a recent blog post on NPR’s “Monkey See” blog. Linda Holmes argues that libraries are posed to become the next big pop culture phenomenon, based primarily on the recent popularity of library-related videos such as the BYU “New Spice” video, the Old Spice Guy reply to Andy Woodworth‘s twitter campaign to get him to talk about libraries, and the “Librarians do Gaga” video.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree that popularity and buzz about libraries is a good thing, especially at a time when many libraries are seeing their budgets go on the chopping block. However, I was surprised by the nearly universal approval of the idea of libraries being “the next cupcake,” as evidenced by uncritical retweeting of the story. Now, I realize that there is only so much that one can say in 140 characters. But I only saw one person point out that fads and trends fade – and sometimes rather quickly (thanks, @LizB). Continue reading →

I resisted using a twitter management tool for a long time, since I don’t have a smart phone and only tweet from my laptop. I figured just using the twitter web site itself was all I needed. However, last week I had a couple of messages I wanted to send out, but I didn’t want to send them out all at once. I had to leave the apartment for the afternoon, so I couldn’t just wait to make my tweets. But, wait a minute! Doesn’t Tweetdeck let you schedule tweets for later? I looked it up – yes, it does. So I downloaded Tweetdeck and scheduled my tweet. Problem solved!

So, I have been using Tweetdeck on a trial basis since that day to see how I like it. Folks, it is pretty cool. Instead of just one long feed of all the updates from people you follow, you can customize several columns to keep track of several things at once. Continue reading →

Marginalia are notes written in the margins of books. These can be comments, annotations, notes, asides, scribbles, doodles, or anything else that occurred to the reader to jot down (or the copyist, for medieval manuscripts). They can be amusing, enlightening, irrelevant, silly, or occasionally evidence of brilliant insight. This blog will comprise my marginal notes for the web. While my focus is on libraries, librarianship, and information access and use, sometimes I will have other topics on my mind. Posts on knitting, music, or any subject that strikes my fancy will crop up from time to time. While I don’t expect to come up with any influential theorems, I hope my marginalia will be interesting and occasionally thought-provoking.